Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016)

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Cities are, in many ways,

the greatest invention

that human beings

have brought to the world.

Cities have been expanding

and urbanization has been

expanding on the globe

in an exponential fashion.

Most extraordinarily,

we are urbanizing people

on the planet, at maybe

one and a half

million people every week

In less than 2 months

there'll be the equivalent

to another Los Angeles

metropolitan area

on this planet.

This scale and speed

of urbanization

has never, ever happened

in human history.

This is the first time.

When you look at

what is being built in cities

you have endless, endless

row after row

of h*m* towers.

And you see more

and more highways.

At this moment, you're

going to shape the cities

for generations to come.

People need to realize

this is an opportunity

which will never come again.

There are a couple of ways

of approaching

the design of cities.

The question is always

who decides..

...what the physical form

will be..

...how the city

is going to function

and who is going

to live in the city.

In order to understand

what's happening today..

...we need to think

about 2 great figures

in the middle

of the 20th century

who embodied the struggle

for the city.

The legendary power broker

Robert Moses

represented the authority

of the great man

who was gonna come into the

city with his carving Kn*fe

and clear away

the cancerous tissue..

[crash]

...and replace it

with the shiny implements

of modernist planning.

Uh, you have to move

a lot of people out of the way

of a big housing, uh, project

or, uh,

slum clearance project.

A lot of 'em

are not going to like it.

Many of them are misinformed.

In opposition

to the h*m* clarity

of Moses was Jane Jacobs.

I have very little faith, uh

i -- in, in even

the kind of person

who, uh, prefers

to take a large overall

uh, view of things.

Jacobs was an outsider.

She believed the city

is not about buildings.

The city is about people.

It is about public spaces

and the street

and she stood up for that.

She evolved both a theory

of what made a good

and just city

and a theory of opposition

to the kind of planning practice

that Moses represented.

There's a prudishness,

a fear of life

a wish

to direct things from

some uncontaminated refuge

that is part and parcel

of their bad plan.

They were famously at odds

with each other.

It really did become a w*r

between opposing forces.

Today we're still fighting

these battles

across the world.

When we look across the

spectrum of all the problems

generated by urbanization

there is the extraordinary

realization that, my gosh

you know, these have been

problems that have been around

for the last 100 years

in cities.

New York, of course

is the greatest example

of that.

In the 1930s

New York was the world's

greatest city, you know?

A very special place.

Just the exuberance

of metropolitan life

in the early 20th century.

That's, you know,

the -- the great age

of the first

real great skyscrapers.

You know,

the Empire State Building

is the very climax of that.

But then,

it all kind of crashes

with The Depression.

Through the entire decade

of the '30s

it's just one problem

after another.

Down at street level

was this degraded environment.

Slums and dirt

and, and pollution

that did not fit

with the glorious spires

of the new skyscraper city.

The city was overcrowded

harsh, dirty, dangerous

and infested with disease.

Jacob Riis' famous book

"How The Other Half Live"

brought a lot of attention

to this.

The idea was, we will solve

the city's problem

by cleaning it up.

Now this is a unfortunate

period for the city.

We've done an immense amount

to cure these diseases

and we have much more to do.

Robert Moses

started to work in an era

where we had a great many people

living in truly

horrible conditions.

He began his professional life

in opposition

to those conditions.

Moses emerged out

of the Progressive Movement

early in the 20th century

in New York.

The progressives were eager

to improve the city.

His early work

in developing public parks

and public beaches

was about making life better

for people who were not rich.

Now if we don't

clean out these slums

the central areas

are going to rot.

And it's all nonsense to say

that the problem can be solved

by rehabilitating

and fixing up

Old Law Tenements.

It can't be done.

That problem

we've got to face.

Just about every progressive

believed

that the way to solve

the city's problems

was to wipe the slate clean,

start all over again.

We didn't understand

how high the price was

how we were giving up

so many things

that were so very important

until Jane Jacobs came along.

Jane always would see

in a city opportunities

that existed there.

She observed

hints of regeneration

hints of creativity

hints of resourcefulness.

It was this life spring

of people coming

to make their way.

I think that must have shaped

her approach to the city.

I just loved

coming to New York.

It was inexhaustible.

Just to walk around

its streets and wonder at it.

So many streets different.

So many neighborhoods different.

Uh, so much going on.

She lived

in Greenwich Village

and just viscerally felt

the pulse of the city

and was

extraordinarily intuitive.

Was extremely observant.

New York was a place

where you don't have to be

big and important and rich

or have a great plot of land

or a great development scheme

or something like that

to do something.

And maybe

even do something new

and do something interesting.

A place that has scope

for all kinds of people.

What she saw

was the soul of New York

and what it meant to be a city

and a city meaning

a community of people.

After the w*r,

the most sensational thing

that came was the full flowering

of this vision

of the expressway tower city.

This generation of idealistic

city planners comes along

and they're infected

with the modernist

purity idea.

And they certainly have

the tools at their disposal

to sweep away

large tracts of land.

We recognize the problems

that your community faces

and we know that you share them

with hundreds of cities

everywhere.

Now what's involved in making

your city a better place?

Well, things like housing

industrial development

better streets and highways.

Improving all these things

adds up to a better city.

I'm sure that you will see

the exciting opportunity

that exists for your city

to become better.

There was this emerging idea

that crowded urban areas

where people were kind of

hanging out on the street

on their stoops, uh, where

there was a lot of poverty

that the way

to deal with that problem

was to effectively

get rid of the streets.

Was effectively to eliminate

that sidewalk culture.

And build projects that would

make it impossible really

for people to kind of cluster

in public in that way.

The idea of urban renewal

was that

places that were blighted

were a cancer on the city

and therefore, we're gonna

cut out the cancer.

The planners conceiving

these urban renewal projects

are doing this from that

God-like vantage point

in the sky.

To be able to look down

and you're able to imagine

massive transformations.

They thought

that applying the logic

of The Machine Age

was gonna do that.

The problem had to be solved

by some supervisor

noticing where the slums were,

noticing where the traffic was

and going in and bulldozing..

...and building

grand projects.

Well, we got out

a brochure just now

telling when everybody

has to move.

Robert Moses was

the great embodiment of this.

I don't honestly believe that

considering the large numbers

of people we've had

to move out

of the way of public housing

and other public improvements

I don't believe

that we've done

any very substantial

amount of harm.

There must be people

who are discommoded

inconvenienced

or call it what you will

on the old theory,

that you can't make an omelet

without breaking some eggs.

After the Second World w*r

Robert Moses

began to amass power.

He was the august

parks commissioner

in the city of New York.

And he got power

to build parkways.

He was appointed the city's

construction coordinator.

He built

thousands of apartments.

He became urban renewal czar

the head of the mayor's

committee on slum clearance.

By the time

that Moses was running

the Urban Renewal Program

we had torn down

literally thousands

of tenement buildings

in cities like New York

and Chicago.

You know, there's the,

the pre-w*r Moses

and the post-w*r Moses.

The pre-w*r Moses

was mostly an angel.

Post-w*r Moses

was increasingly problematic.

For nearly half a century

this man has pushed people

around New York.

Almost anybody

who is anybody has cursed him

fought him, knuckled

under to him and admired him.

The list of his adversaries

include Franklin Roosevelt

Fanny Hurst, Elmer Davis

who once compared him

to h*tler, Walter O'Malley

and hundreds

of thousands of landowners

who thought

their property was sacred.

Absolute power

corrupts absolutely

and Robert Moses

was absolutely powerful.

So he had amassed,

um, not simply

an incredible amount of power

but had insulated himself

from oversight

by political authorities

and by the broader public.

Don't forget that

it's one thing to buy a park

or a great big chunk of land

from one owner.

It's quite another thing

to get a right-of-way

where hundreds and even

thousands of people own it.

You theoretically and,

according to some of the, uh

goo-goos

and uplift organizations

we ought to negotiate with every

individual until he's happy.

Can you imagine

when you'd build anything

under those conditions?

Moses along

with all of the people

that were involved

in the Urban Renewal Program

had an agreed-upon agenda.

People needed adequate housing

adequate recreation facilities

and the motorcar

was coming to America

and it needed to be

accommodated on a large scale.

That was the agenda.

Moses became one polar view

of what you could do.

Until, all of a sudden,

there was an alternative.

Jane Jacobs has in

"The Death and Life

of Great American Cities"

written a book that advances

with the controlled

and implacable power

of a bulldozer

against modern orthodox city

planning and rebuilding.

I first began

to look into city planning

and, and housing

and it was unbelievably awful.

Uh, insane.

When "Death And Life"

comes out in the '60s

it's a clarion call.

It's Martin Luther

nailing those 95 theses

to the, to the cathedral door.

The book is really

the first cogent

accessible articulation

of a whole set of ideas

that questions the mainstream

thinking about our cities.

She is constantly probing.

By that example, she's saying

"You, reader, you have

the ability to question."

"Look what we have built.

"Low-income projects

that become

"worse centers of delinquency

"vandalism and general

social hopelessness

"than the slums they were

supposed to replace.

"Middle-income

housing projects

"which are truly

marvels of dullness

and regimentation..

"...sealed against

any buoyancy or vitality

of city life.

"Luxury housing projects

that mitigate their inanity

"or try to

with a vapid vulgarity.

"Cultural centers

that are unable to support

"a good bookstore.

"Civic centers that are

avoided by everyone but bums

"who have fewer choices of

loitering place than others.

"Expressways that

eviscerate great cities.

"This is not

the rebuilding of cities.

This is the sacking

of cities."

She was questioning orthodoxy

and in essence saying

the emperor has no clothes..

...at a time

when women were not welcomed

in those kinds

of environments.

If you wanna see what kind

of a city can flourish

you need to look at the cities

where it's happening.

There must be a lot

of diversity

continually building up,

diversity of kinds of work..

...diversity

of kinds of people.

She revealed the way

to create better cities

is by working with the people

who live there

and the fabric that existed.

The traditional fabric

that people inhabited.

There have to be

areas of the city

which people use a lot,

walking on the streets

and use at all times of day.

Jane understood neighborhoods

need lots of connections.

Short blocks, lots of turns

allowing different

kinds of interaction.

Neighborhoods need a mix

of buildings, old and new.

They need diverse uses, 24/7,

so that they're safer.

Constant connection with,

uh, neighborhoods around

so that you're not isolated.

You need public spaces

that are accessible to people.

It's all a great network

in the city.

It's all related.

She observed these early,

early qualities at a time

when housing was being built

in completely

opposite direction.

They were

isolating communities.

They were creating

dead-end streets.

They were separating work uses

and recreation

and residential uses.

She was explaining

how life worked.

Before "Death And Life,"

she was a journalist.

She was a very savvy observer

of human behavior

of places, of cities.

Jacobs started writing

about the city

when she was 18 years old.

She was a secretary

for a candy company.

She was determined

to write on the side.

She did what any good

enterprising writer would do.

She got freelance jobs.

Her curiosity

was so remarkable.

She writes about specific

economic districts

in the city.

She does the Jewelry District

she does the Fur District,

she does the Flower District

and she develops a voice.

And where does

she sell them to?

"Vogue" magazine.

She was writing pieces

about what she was observing

and seeing in the city.

"The best way

to plan for Downtown

"is to see

how people use it today.

"To look for its strengths

"and to exploit

and reinforce them.

"There is no logic that can

be superimposed on the city.

"People make it.

"And it is to them,

not buildings

that we must fit our plans."

"Q Magazine" accepted

one of her stories

about manhole covers.

She discovered that they had

all kinds of interesting

uh, patterns on them,

interesting lettering.

How many female journalists

were writing

about manhole covers?

Nobody. But she was.

She wanted to figure out how

the sewer system was working.

She's curious.

She's got a really good craft.

She knows how to write.

And she finds herself

in a staff job

with "Architectural Forum."

Mrs. Jacobs,

an associate editor

of the magazine

"Architectural Forum"

has been a New Yorker

for 27 years

and loves it,

Mrs. Jane Jacobs.

[applause]

Thank you very much,

Mr. Dolbier.

One fine day,

"Architectural Forum" put me

on an assignment

about some urban renewal

projects that were being done.

In Philadelphia,

as a matter of fact.

We have found, in our work

in rebuilding Philadelphia

that a central design idea,

well-developed

and clearly-expressed,

can of itself

become a major creative force

and can make more meaningful

the work of individual

architects

in various parts of an area.

I found out

what they had in mind

and what they were

planning to do

and how it was going to look

according to the drawings

and what great things

it was going to accomplish.

I came back and wrote

enthusiastic articles

about this.

All was well,

I was in very cozy

with the planners

and the project builders.

Anyhow, time passed

and some of these things

were actually built.

Society Hill is residential.

The oldest part of the city,

it is the site

of an intensive

restoration project.

Houses, many pre-dating

the American Revolution

slowly had grown dilapidated

and had been converted

to other uses.

In addition,

there was room for new

dramatically contemporary

apartment towers.

Society Hill emerges

as a combination

of ancient and modern.

But they didn't work at all

the way they should've worked.

The city around them

didn't react the way

uh, theoretically

the city around them

should have reacted.

She is the

hyper-sensitive antennae

you know, that's picking up

something here

that no one else is seeing.

Why did stores that looked

very cheerful and posed

to, uh, be doing a great

booming business in the plans

actually go empty

or languish?

Well, I would bring

these questions up

with the people

who had been responsible

for the, uh, planning

of these places.

And I got quite

a lot of alibis

boiling down to,

uh, "People are stupid.

They don't do

what they're supposed to do."

And this was a great shock

to me.

Never mind highfalutin

theories and so forth.

What are we looking at?

What are we seeing?

Do you wanna trust some theory

that somebody figured out

sitting in an office

somewhere?

Or do you wanna trust

what you actually see

out there with your own eyes?

Maybe the experts

didn't really know

as much as they

pretended to know.

About this time, a gentleman

came into the office

of the "Architectural Forum."

He was very much worried

about East Harlem.

About 300 million dollars

uh, worth

of city rebuilding money

had been put to work.

He could see

that their problems

were growing greater

than they had ever been

in the past.

She goes up to Harlem

and she was taken around

by William Kirk

of the Union Settlement House.

And he's showing her

all the things

that are being lost

in this community

when it's being demolished.

He would walk me

around East Harlem.

We would stop in at stores

stop in at housing projects.

I began to see the..

Just out of the accumulation

of all of this

I was beginning to understand

how things worked.

Many little details

of cause and effect.

She describes it

as the very beginning.

The sort of moment

when the light bulb

kind of went off in her head.

What I was seeing,

in fact, was, uh

what makes the very intricate

order of the city.

This has to do with a quality

that's called

rather vaguely urbanism.

Cities are extremely

physical places.

It's not an inert mass.

It's enterprises and people

reacting in certain ways

to each other

and mutually supporting

each other.

And wherever

it worked properly

there seemed to be

an awful lot of diversity.

Many different kinds

of enterprises

many different kinds

of people

mutually supporting

and supplementing each other.

Jane Jacobs is thinking about

how does a neighborhood work?

How does a street work?

What function

does a sidewalk play?

But what she's really after

is a new theory

of how cities function.

"In Death And Life

Of Great American Cities"

she's asking what is

the problem of a city?

She argues,

"A city is a problem

of organized complexity."

Looks on the surface

like it's complex

and disorderly..

...but in fact, there's

an underlying structure.

Looks like chaos,

but in fact,

there's a balance.

There's a productive mix

of different functions

and organisms.

She draws

on ecological metaphors

biological metaphors

to suggest how

it's really an ecosystem.

She wrote..

"To see complex systems

of functional order

"as order and not as chaos

takes understanding.

"The leaves dropping

from the trees in the autumn

"the interior

of an airplane engine..

"...the entrails

of a dissected rabbit..

"...the city desk

of a newspaper..

"all appear to be chaos

"if they are seen

without comprehension.

"Once they are seen

as systems of order

they actually look different."

Jacobs understood

when cities really work

they're phenomena that come

from the bottom up.

So a great neighborhood

is what happens

when thousands

of different actors..

...and that's the shopkeepers,

the bar owners

the people walking the streets

they spontaneously

come together

in, in an uncoordinated

but meaningful way

to create the kind of flavor

and personality

of a distinct neighborhood.

That's not planned.

That's much more a question

of organized complexity.

Jane Jacobs understood that

living cities are not pretty.

They're messy, uh, chaotic

dense with people

interacting together.

Dead cities are beautiful

in a certain sense

because they tend

to look predictable.

There aren't very many people.

If you can understand a city,

then that city is dead.

Living cities are congested.

They're frustrating.

And at the same time, that's

where your dreams come true.

Planners, they don't see any

of the wondrous human qualities

that Jacobs is seeing.

The very forms of urbanism

that she wrote about

the urban renewalists

sought to destroy.

What would you do for Harlem?

- The slum corner of Harlem.

- Yes.

I'd take that and all

the other similar slums.

I'd tear 'em all out,

every bit of 'em.

It's a cancerous thing

and you've just got

to wipe them out.

I say that you have

a cancerous growth there

that has to be carved out.

Alright, you've carved it out

and now you've replaced

it with something new.

Yes, that's right.

With something that's decent

something that involves

light and air

and, uh, new schools

and playgrounds and parks.

And I'd say that's a hell

of a big contribution

and certainly

all the contribution

that I would be able to make

with all the people

I can persuade to make it.

Instead of following

the natural way

that people use space

city planning

in this post-w*r era

and modern architecture

created

this abstract vision

of what it should be.

Concentrated on the utopian

and the ideal.

In the 1920s,

you get the rise

of this curious,

mystical figure

um, out of Switzerland

uh, who calls himself

Le Corbusier.

He's done some architecture

and he's bethinking himself

not only an architect,

but a great urban visionary.

The real gestation

of his ideas

about modernist urbanism

that came as a result

of riding in an airplane

over Paris.

Seeing the city

from up in the air

looking down God-like

on this diorama

versus considering and knowing

the city from the streets.

Corb was enraptured

by the airplane.

He writes that the airplane

indicts the mess

we've made of our cities.

Before the wheels

hit the tarmac

he's concluded that we need

to sweep all this away

and rebuild our cities.

Le Corbusier envisioned

tearing down

huge sections of Paris..

...and replacing it with slabs

modern slabs,

cruciform buildings.

He proposed superhighways

that went through

green open space.

And they were going

to terminate in superblocks.

And the superblocks

had high-rise buildings

and the high-rise buildings

were so that people

could have light and air

and they could get out

of the slums.

He was thoroughly

of the opinion

that if you had,

uh, good architecture

the lives of people

would be improved

and that architecture

would improve people

and people would improve

architecture

until perfectibility

would descend on us

like The Holy Ghost

and we'd be happy forever after.

Corb did this plan

and made his models

and, uh, it excited

a lot of people.

But in France,

they weren't so excited.

The idea of the Ville Radieuse

and the tower in a park

ended up, uh, moving to America

just like the rest

of modernism did.

To help us get a glimpse

into the future

of this unfinished world

of ours

there has been created

for the New York World's Fair

a thought-provoking exhibit

of the developments

ahead of us.

In 1939, General Motors

had an exhibition.

The Futurama.

It showed superhighways.

And everybody in America

wanted this.

Here is an American city

replanned

around a highly-developed

modern traffic system.

Rebuilt and replanned.

Residential, commercial

and industrial areas

all have been separated

for greater efficiency

and greater convenience.

The '39 World's Fair

in New York

was a Corbusier event.

It celebrated that style.

And so we see some suggestion

of the things to come.

A world with a future

in which all of us

are tremendously interested

because that is where

we are going to spend

the rest of our lives.

In a future

which can be whatever

we propose to make it.

Modernism moved

into the mainstream

of both American

commercial architecture

and urban renewal.

The public housing model that

we picked in the United States

was a misinterpretation

of Le Corbusier.

The towers in his 1923 plan

were for offices,

and then around the towers

were low 7 story buildings

with generous balconies.

He never called for people

living in high-rise towers.

It was one

of those odd moments

where a set

of intellectual ideas

could be corrupted

very quickly and easily

into something

cheap and commercial.

The simplest formula to make

quick money is modernism.

And it was very cheap,

very quick to produce

and could suddenly enable

huge amounts of building

to happen very quickly.

And Robert Moses

totally understood that.

The one thing

missing completely

from that vision is streets.

And the idea that a street is

something you actually walk on

and a street is a place

where things happen.

Jane Jacobs saw that at a time

when everybody else

was thinking the sidewalk

was a kind of foolish leftover

of another age.

"This is something

everyone already knows.

"A well-used city street

is apt to be a safe street.

"A deserted city street

is apt to be unsafe.

"But how does this work

really?

"There must be eyes

upon the street.

"Eyes belonging to those

we may call

"the natural proprietors

of the street.

"The buildings on a street

equipped to handle strangers

"and to ensure

the safety of both

residents and strangers

"must be oriented

to the street.

"They cannot turn their backs

or blank sides on it

and leave it blind."

Philosophically,

what she recognized was

safety doesn't come

from armed security guards

or blocking the entrances.

What makes a neighborhood

great is precisely the fact

that there are people

on the street.

"The sidewalk must have users

on it fairly continuously

"both to add to the numbers

of effective eyes

on the street

"and to induce the people in

the buildings along the street

"to watch the sidewalks

in sufficient numbers.

"Nobody enjoys sitting

on a stoop

"or looking out a window

at an empty street.

"Almost nobody does

such a thing.

"Large numbers of people

entertain themselves

off and on

by watching street activity."

She went out

and looked at things.

When she said that the doormen

were paid eyes on the street

and that the same thing

could happen

from bars on the street

in West Village

I understood

what she was talking about.

Nobody has to worry

about things

where there are a lot

of people on the street.

Jane Jacobs reverses

the vantage point.

What is it like actually

to live in these places

from street level?

And it's that simple

change of perspective

that lead her away

from the orthodoxy of the time.

Robert Moses had no interest

really in paying attention

to what was there

in neighborhoods.

What was there, he viewed

as simply an obstacle

to what he wanted

to make happen.

People oppose Moses

all the time.

Whether he wanted Lincoln

Center for the performing arts

a bridge across the entrance

to New York Harbor

a parking lot

where mothers air

their babies in Central Park

a highway down the spine

of Fire Island

or one through the middle

of Washington Square

vehement opposition

was what he expected

and what he got.

Oh, there's opposition

to everything

that's, uh, progressive,

everything that's new.

The opinion of people

who were activists

as we were in the village

were Robert Moses was terrible

and Robert Moses

was destroying the city

and Robert Moses

had to be stopped.

Jane had got involved

in several efforts

to stop Robert Moses from

ripping the city to pieces.

Starting with the, uh,

his attempt

to run Fifth Avenue down

through Washington Square.

The first time

I became aware

of the thr*at

of what the highways

were doing

and could do to New York

was when along came the plan

to push Fifth Avenue through

Washington Square Park

and down below it

as a continuous street.

They, uh, wanted to have

the Fifth Avenue buses

go through the park

down into West Broadway

and change the name of that

to Fifth Avenue South

so as to make it

more valuable for rents.

And that was

a Robert Moses project.

This wasn't in the abstract

for Jane Jacobs.

This was happening

close to home.

Right in her backyard.

This was where

she brought her kids

in strollers

to play in that park.

It was the campus

for a university.

It was the front yard

for neighborhood kids

growing up.

It was a true reflection

of a diverse neighborhood.

This is The Circle.

On weekdays,

it's a wading pool

for village kids.

But on Sundays,

the water is turned off

and the circle becomes

a meeting place

for guitarists,

bongo and banjo players

villagers on a stroll,

folk singers and tourists.

To me and to many others,

we were outraged

about a road going

through Washington Square

and we were going to save

Washington Square Park.

Washington Square

was really Jane Jacobs'

beginning as a civic activist.

All of the activists,

myself included

were involved in trying

to stop that.

The leaders there

included, uh, Jane Jacobs

and Shirley Hayes.

Shirley Hayes and Edith Lyons

uh, were the 2 women

who started the, the fight

against the roadway

in Washington Square Park.

Jane was not deferential

to power.

So she ups the ante on that

Washington Square fight

and says,

"I'm gonna write the mayor."

"I have heard with alarm

and almost with disbelief

"the plans to run a sunken

highway through the center

"of Washington Square.

"My husband and I

are amongst the citizens

"who truly believe in New York

"to the extent

that we have bought a home

"in the heart of the city

and remodeled it

"with a lot of hard work.

"It is very discouraging

to do our best

"to make the city

more habitable

"and then to learn

that the city itself

is thinking up schemes

to make it uninhabitable."

Jane's example

that she set for herself

is an example

for other people to follow.

If a highway is coming through

that's going

to be very destructive

and you know

it's an idiotic thing

you fight that highway.

Protest against stultification

and the status quo

and things that touch you

and your neighborhood

directly.

I think she was effective

because of the force

of her personality

and the fact that

she was able to mobilize

a lot of people.

And Margaret Meade

and Susan Sontag

and all the various folks

that Jane was involved with

were drawn to the tangibility

of this particular fight.

They get too many critics.

They get too many mud-throwers

too many people who foul

their nest and there we are.

That's our trouble.

Too many people sitting around

calling names like Mumford.

People that,

what do they contribute?

You have any problem

to solve, any difficulty

you'd never call upon them.

Call upon them

for four-letter words.

They don't even have very good

vocabulary in my book.

Robert Moses wasn't used

to anybody saying no to him.

He'd fire off these letters

to people of,

uh, Greenwich Village.

"I realized that

in the process of rebuilding

"south of Washington Square

"there would be

cries of anguish

"from those

who are honestly convinced

"the Sistine Madonna

was painted in the basement

"of one

of the old buildings there

"not presently occupied

by a cabaret or speakeasy.

"That Michelangelo's David

was fashioned

"in a garret

in the same neighborhood.

"And that anyone

who lays hands

"on these sacred landmarks

will be ex*cuted

"if he has not already

been struck down

by a bolt from heaven."

They managed to show Moses

as this bully

and they, they got

a lot of important people

on their side,

including Eleanor Roosevelt.

I would feel very strongly

that destroying the Square

by putting a large artery

for traffic through the Square

would harm

not only the Square itself

but the whole neighborhood

and really the city.

I'm not opposed to change.

In fact, I believe in change.

But I think

that good tradition

has to be preserved.

Jacobs was

a brilliant strategist

when it came to civil action.

She had a real sense

for the photo op.

In Washington Square Park

she arranged for her daughter

and another girl

to conduct

a ribbon-tying ceremony.

This, of course,

was the opposite of

the ribbon cutting ceremony

the politicians loved to,

uh, celebrate

with public works.

It was at one of the hearings

where Moses was foolish enough

to say that

nobody's against us

except a bunch of mothers.

How could he be so tactless?

Only if you think

that people don't matter

at all

could you make

a statement like that.

She was a housewife.

That's how they treated her.

I mean, of course, she was

a professional journalist.

That was not somehow..

When you want to dismiss her,

you just say

there was this housewife

from Hudson Street.

Try to mess

with a bunch of mothers.

Uh, I think that

he underestimated what the, uh

effectiveness of these mothers

might in fact be.

Literally thousands

of people turned to

and it took quite a few years,

but did save it.

It ended up being

an extraordinarily

potent opposition,

which he'd never met before.

Moses had never

met this before.

He had his, he had it coming.

Washington Square Park

was certainly

the first, uh, public defeat

for Robert Moses

and it was a, uh, uh,

a major chink in his armor.

The battle

over Washington Square

is, is Jane's first taste

of victory.

Not long after

the Washington Square victory

"Death And Life" is published.

And Bennett Cerf,

head of Random House

sends a copy to Robert Moses.

And Moses sends it back.

"I am returning

the book you sent me.

"Aside from the fact

that it is intemperate

"and inaccurate..

"...it is also libelous.

I call your attention,

for example, to page 131."

"Robert Moses has made

an art of using control

"of public money

to get his way

"with those whom the voters

elect and depend on

"to represent their frequently

opposing interests.

"This is, of course,

in other guises

an old, sad story

of democratic government."

He didn't even wanna recognize

the existence of the book

or of Jane.

Others, uh, were also,

uh, not charitable

including Lewis Mumford.

Lewis Mumford,

the great architectural critic

for "The New Yorker,"

his famous review of her book

had the title

Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies.

He's immediately telling you

Jane Jacobs was just

this sweet, old lady

trying to get some homeopathic

medicine into the city

instead of doing

the serious surgery

that a real doctor would do.

Right around the time

of "Death and Life

of Great American Cities"

ironically,

her own neighborhood

of the West Village,

the very neighborhood

that she had,

had proclaimed as a model

for what neighborhoods could be

was earmarked

for urban renewal.

Moses was commissioner

of, uh, housing

in the urban renewal effort

to build more public housing

in New York City.

He actually stepped down

from that position

but before he did

he designated

the West Village

as eligible

for slum designation.

I got the book

finished finally

and thought, ah, now I can

think about something else.

And for 3 weeks

I did think

about other things.

Then I opened the

"New York Times" one morning

and found that our own area

of the West Village

was going to have an urban

renewal project in it.

She really didn't think of

herself as a community organizer

as a, a street fighter

or that sort.

She was a writer.

She did not appreciate

the distraction.

She really didn't,

but she knew she had to do it.

She was sad. I mean,

she would shrug her shoulders.

What can I, what can I do?

You know that thing

about an inert object?

Well, there is nothing

more inert

than a government bureau.

There's nothing more inert

than a planning office.

It gets going

in one direction

and it is never going

to change of its own accord.

So I suddenly had to put

into practice my own premises

that if anything was

going to happen to reverse

the way things were being done

then the citizens had

to take some initiative

and the citizens had

to frustrate the planners.

I thereupon

began to devote myself

to frustrating planners.

And so did

the whole neighborhood.

Jane calls a meeting

of local residents

at The Lion's Head

a favorite

neighborhood hangout.

Organizes people to speak

at public meetings

and gets everybody

to wear sunglasses

with an X painted on them.

They were fairly sophisticated

I think, in the tactics

that they would employ

and they're tackling somebody

who's been writing

for a living

for a couple of decades

and knows how

to make an argument.

We all knew one another

and were constantly planning

on how to, uh,

get the mayor on our side

and how to thr*aten him.

And we did.

We got him on our side.

She filed a lawsuit

against the city of New York

to try to block

the urban renewal plan.

"I think

that the time has come

"to put the West Village

"urban renewal proposal

to rest.

"Promptly remove

the West Village designation.

Cordially, Robert F. Wagner."

They prevailed and, uh,

at the end of the day

the slum designation never

happened in the West Village.

She effectively showed

the people

of Greenwich Village

that they could fight city hall

that they did not

have to accept

the plans of the planners

at their drafting tables

and that they could

reject those lines

being drawn

around their homes.

We need to understand

Greenwich Village

is a proxy here for a wave

that was starting to take

hold in the United States

where there was

increasing resistance

to centralized authority.

Her strategy

was certainly informed

by other struggles that were

going on at the time.

Within 3 years of each other

Jacobs published her book.

Uh, Betty Friedan published

"The Feminine Mystique."

Rachel Carson

published "Silent Spring."

The Environmental Movement.

Civil Rights.

The movement

for decent cities

feminism, you know

all were being born at once

and all were sharing tools

of propaganda,

of local organizing

of civil disobedience.

Jane Jacobs was perhaps

the most articulate voice

of a movement that now seems

merely common sense.

Any city that's

tearing down its buildings

just to make money

for a development

or, uh, just to have novelty

is doing something criminal.

A fella who gets up

in the upper stories

of a, of a

public housing project

where he has a view,

what's the matter with him?

He's got a nice place

to live, hasn't he?

I think that the objection

that some might have

was that the view is just

of another housing development

and another highway.

No, I don't concede that.

It wasn't just

that they wanted

new housing

in place of the old.

They wanted an entirely

different-looking city.

Robert Moses

and his constituency

wanted it all to be

very simplified

very sterilized.

It was the hubris

of Moses and his ilk.

The idea that we're gonna

rearrange the spaces

and therefore,

we're gonna rearrange

the social relations.

It had to do with this

towers-in-the-park mentality.

It had to do

with the creation

of a new form of ghetto.

Whole downtowns

were being bulldozed

in the name of people,

but not for the people.

They were destroying lives

and replacing them

with these housing projects.

And why?

Because it was making

a lot of people

a lot of money.

It was making developers

a lot of money

politicians a lot of money

and it was fast money.

So they kept doing it

over and over and over again

in cities

all over the country.

It was several years

after Robert Moses had begun

building these projects

that the other cities

caught up.

What they were building

was the Corbusier model.

You saw the kind

of building of these

uh, these housing projects

across the United States.

You know, 25 story

block apartment buildings

with playgrounds

and gardens around them

that looked great

in all the drawings.

Here in bright, new buildings

with spacious grounds,

they can live.

Live with indoor plumbing,

electric lights

fresh plastered walls and the

rest of the conveniences

that are expected

in the 20th century.

In these projects,

children can play in safety

on the wide lawns

not in the littered alleys

and vacant lots.

We must make sure

that every family in America

lives in a home of dignity

in a neighborhood of pride

and a community of opportunity

and a city of promise

and hope.

But what ended up happening

is nobody ever hung out

on, uh, in the kind of

public space around these

uh, projects

and so they became

these under-populated places.

And they actually

very quickly became

some of the most dangerous

places in the world.

Concentrated poverty.

This was a,

you know, the really

the worst thing

about, uh, the projects

and therefore, amplified

all of the pathological

and antisocial elements

of poverty.

These institutions

became fortressed.

You become cornered.

You feel cornered.

You feel trapped.

They left people

more vulnerable.

Public housing

became places of fear.

High-rise fortresses

like these

were built this way

to save money.

In the long run,

they didn't even do that.

The problem was

that they were all wrong

for the people

who wound up living in them.

Rural blacks, broken families

allowed in and to stay in

only if their incomes

were low enough.

Most cities now are engaged

in something

called urban renewal

which means

moving the Negroes out.

It means n*gro removal.

That is what it means.

And the federal government

is an accomplice to this fact.

Now this, we are talking

about human beings.

There's not such a thing

as a monolithic wall

or, you know, some abstraction

called n*gro problem.

These n*gro boys and girls

who at 16 and 17 don't believe

the country means

anything that it says

and don't feel that

they have any place here.

The phrase, Urban renewal

is n*gro removal

was an acknowledgement

by African-Americans

that, that this was

an as*ault.

Removal is in the sense of

out, over there,

away, far away.

Some place inhospitable

where you can just die.

And a huge part of

what happened to people was

that they were put

in inhospitable places.

And African-Americans were put

in at the margins of the city

in places that were,

could barely support

the vital kind of life

that people need to prosper.

It's as though the builders

have not realized

that children

would be living there

nor did they foresee the crime

the vandalism, which is really

the acting out of rage

and self-loathing

that can make people want

to destroy their own property.

People had lived

in communities

that were messy,

but they worked.

People had social capitals,

people watched

each other's child

when somebody was not there.

All this

was actually taken away.

People had

no investment emotionally.

People resented these projects

that had been built for them

because they were poor.

So you see

a lot of windows broken out.

They all were broken out

by children throwing rocks.

And, uh, what's more natural

than children throwing rocks?

They don't have

nothing else to do.

There's absolutely

no recreation facilities here.

And, uh,

the playground like this

is a mockery

for thousands of children.

Tenants had no input

as to what they wanted.

Uh, it was built

because somebody said

this would be good

for children to play on.

There were

graffiti everywhere

and there were drug problems

and all the problems

that you can imagine come from

when you uproot people

without their will.

And what do you expect, that

they will love these projects?

No, that wasn't gonna happen.

Pruitt-Igoe,

if you really see

an, uh, an aerial view of it

those buildings were spaced

quite a distance apart.

If you took them

and threw them on their faces

which is where

they should've fallen

you will get lovely housing

20 feet high.

You can take a look

at a little exercise here

that if these towers,

these slabs

are removed from the towers

you begin to see

a different attitude

of what is visible.

You begin to see through

the site

as opposed to looking

at a slab of buildings running.

One thing, the tenants

are really stressing

is for a low-rise building

closer to a home.

Something that

they can relate to.

What we are trying

to do here

is to take a given situation

and try to bring it back

to a community where people

would want to live.

After thinking

about the problem

of the

Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project

the city planners blew it up.

[expl*si*n]

Just dynamited it away.

The projects end up

being tremendous failures.

You know, we know all

about that failure now.

And everywhere they existed

30, 40 years later

they're all being torn down.

You can't put streets back

where you took them out.

You can't put stores back.

You can't put the daily life

and all the institutions.

It takes generations

to build up

those institutions.

That's what was eliminated

by these projects.

[expl*si*n]

The superblock urbanism

of the modernist ilk

that Jane Jacobs,

uh, writes about

is, is destroying cities.

You also have,

at the very same time

the automobile

being rammed through.

This causes as many problems

as the urban renewal projects.

The most profound influence

on the city

in the last hundred years

has been the automobile.

The decision

made almost inevitable

was to drive the freeways,

the interstates in some

right through the cities

and through neighborhoods

whose value city elites

and developers

wanted to ultimately reclaim.

We wouldn't have

any American economy

without

the automobile business.

That's literally true.

I believe that

that this is a great industry

that has to go on

and has to keep on turning out

cars and trucks and buses

and there have to be places

for them to run.

There have to be modern roads.

The first of Moses'

commandments for progress

is thou shalt drive.

Jane Jacobs was

one of the very first people

to say the car is not supreme.

The people who walk

on the sidewalk

are what makes the city.

It isn't hard to understand

that producing

and consuming automobiles

might seem all-important

to the management of Ford

and Chrysler

and General Motors.

But it's harder to understand

why the production

and consumption of automobiles

should be the purpose of life

for all the rest of us.

Moses was about realizing

a very particular vision

of the American dream.

That was, you know,

what's good for General Motors

is good for

the United States of America.

I'm privileged to present

the winner

of the Grand National Award.

Robert Moses of New York.

Robert Moses, New York City

Construction Coordinator

is a world-famous

highway planner.

A man who knows his business.

What he was really doing was

tearing up vital neighborhoods.

For example, in the South Bronx

where he built

the Cross Bronx Expressway.

This was the single most

destructive decision

ever made about US cities.

The Cross Bronx Expressway

an artery

whose history was marked by

such gigantic problems

of construction, financing

relocation

and organized obstruction

that it took 17 years

to complete.

The Cross Bronx Expressway

ripped through the heart

and the middle of the Bronx

creating

what was a wall between

what eventually was known as

the northern and the southern

part of the Bronx.

Robert Moses thought

he'd get away with anything.

Who's gonna stop him?

He's got all the city

politicians on his side

because he's bringing

a lot of federal money

from the

federal highway program.

And that gets passed around.

Today our greatest

single problem

is tenant removal.

The, uh, tendency on the part

of people in politics

as well as those

who are living on these

rights-of-way

who are immediately affected

is to assume that the people

who are doing this job

are unsympathetic.

They're even sadistic.

Well, of course,

that isn't the truth at all.

When Moses would ram the

Cross Bronx Expressway through

it was not just breaking down

the physical structure

of that borough literally

so south and north

become different

but the community.

When you remove

the daily life

when you remove the stores,

you remove the places

that constitute

where they spend time

what we would call

the public realm

the sidewalks, the bars,

the grocery stores

you remove the city.

And that's what

Jane Jacobs says.

You draw away the people

with a prescription

that is guaranteed

to hurt cities.

Well, you have to bull it

through. You've gotta do it.

It's like all these, these

things that have opposition.

The fact that 2000 people

come and agitate

against the extension

of an expressway

doesn't prove that you're not

gonna build the expressway.

So many of the problems

of the South Bronx grew directly

out of the devastation caused

by building that expressway.

Which, of course,

became totally gridlocked

15 minutes after it was open.

I mean, Moses thought

he was improving the city

by bringing it up-to-date

by making it work

for the automobile.

And as it became clear

that urban highways

were, in fact

uh, profoundly destructive

it really became a battle

between opposing forces.

Of course, in Lower Manhattan

uh, Moses,

uh, wanted to build a road

right across,

um, uh, the city there.

The Whole Cast Iron District

would've been

basically obliterated.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was to have connected

the Holland Tunnel

with the Williamsburg

and Manhattan Bridges.

It would've destroyed

most of SoHo.

We would've lost one

of the greatest inventories

of 19th century buildings,

not just in New York

but in the world.

The highways, of course

destroyed the neighborhoods

that they went through.

Where was this going to end?

The whole place was going

to be laced with highways.

What would we have left

of Manhattan?

On any day of the week,

if you walk along Canal Street

and it's often faster

than riding

this is what you'll see.

The crush of endless

waiting traffic.

Now look at the solution.

A Lower Manhattan Expressway

only practical

highway crossing

serving the Lower Manhattan

commercial

and business districts.

Can we afford to let

one section of our city

slowly strangle in hopeless

traffic congestion?

There was an awful campaign

against that neighborhood.

It was called

Hell's Hundred Acres.

A bottled-up,

stagnating section

of the city.

No new private buildings

erected in 30 years.

A valley

of economic depression.

The need is urgent.

We must have a Lower Manhattan

Expressway now.

The local priest

in a church on Broom Street

had heard about Jane's

successful defenses

fighting Moses

and asked if she could help.

Father, what effect do you feel

that the expressway will have

on the neighborhood?

Well, the expressway will,

will destroy the neighborhood.

This is the worst thing

about these monumental plans.

There is no way there

that old buildings

can easily be torn down

and new ones put up.

Old things adapted

to different use.

It's settled.

Well, that's not planning

for the future.

Reminded of some

of the opposition

to his longtime dream

for an expressway

across Lower Manhattan

Moses was specific

about what it takes

to override

the inevitable roadblocks.

You gotta move people.

And that,

the political leaders

naturally, if they have

people ticketed

and they know where they are

and they vote right

they don't wanna move 'em

and have 'em go somewhere else.

What I try to do,

uh, in New York

what we've done successfully

in other places

which is to pay more money

to people in cash.

Come take the money

and go away.

You got people who rent.

They don't own anything.

So what different does it make

when you're talking

about a, uh, an expressway

that costs

84 million dollars?

Stop being victims.

I think it's wicked

in a way, to be a victim.

It's even wickeder

to be a predator

but it's wicked to be

a victim and allow it.

You can't, as an individual,

you can't do anything

but you can organize.

If you're being victimized

by an expressway

that a bureaucracy

is putting through

for the benefit

of the automobile people

then you fight that you refuse

to be a victim of that.

What effect do you think

this will have

on the neighborhood itself?

It will destroy

the neighborhood.

It's one of the few

neighborhoods that you can..

A woman can go down the streets

at night and be safe.

And the women know it

and I know it.

2 or 3 o'clock in the morning

the men are sitting

in the cafes

and they're watching you,

taking care of you.

You wanna build

up neighborhoods like this.

They say let's get back

to the old, safe neighborhoods.

This is it!

Memorandum to Arthur Hodgkiss

from Robert Moses.

"The Lower Manhattan

will move very soon.

Please keep an eye on it."

Mr. Simon,

are you saying that

they're trying

to sneak it through?

I would say it's a sleeper.

If this thing is passed, uh

these are how

these things happen.

If they're not watched,

uh, it's a sleeper.

Who do you think

is pushing this?

Well, uh,

there's only one man

that I can think of

that can be pushing.

They seem to think

that they have a choice.

That they'd rather stay

in the houses

that they've lived in

all this time.

The whole federal

arterial aid program

running into billions of dollars

depend upon the votes of a few

a very few people

in one section.

We wouldn't build anything.

Nothing would be built.

There'd be no highways,

there'd be no -- no housing.

There, there'd be

no public improvements.

Please do not build

this express highway.

Most of these people

consider automobiles

more than the human being.

It is not right!

I think it's awful.

I don't think it's fair.

I don't think it's very good

'cause I live there,

I look out my window.

The truck, the car

and everything.

They don't need expressway.

What they gonna do,

throw me in the street?

After 51 years,

I'm citizen and everything?

There's something awful

to think every day

they gonna throw you out.

I think it's awful thing.

They make me sick.

I hope God

they have to be damn sick.

That's what I hope. Goodbye.

Thank you.

It was gonna be

a defining hearing

in which they would approve

the expressway.

And Jane said,

when they discuss this issue

I'm gonna get up

and I'm gonna speak against it.

I went up, uh,

to the microphone.

I was very angry.

They weren't listening to us.

They had made their decision.

That was clear.

They were really

only errand boys

who had no power

to make decisions.

So we had better let them

take back a message.

We would never stand

for this expressway.

I intended just to climb up

to their level

and walk across the stage.

There was a stenotypist

who had a new machine.

She was frightened

and she picked up

her stenotype machine

and clasped it to her bosom.

The tapes fell out

of the machine

and ran across the floor

like confetti.

People began tossing it

in the air.

I knew it had

to be brought to an end

so an inspiration struck me.

I said, "There is no hearing

"because the record is gone.

And without a record,

there can't be a hearing."

The chief state person

was saying

"Arrest that woman.

Arrest that woman."

As I went out,

police captain told me that

uh, I was arrested.

The police

were very apologetic.

They knew who she was

and what was going on.

She was charged

with 3 felonies

which is pretty rotten

for what she did.

What did she do?

She didn't hurt anybody.

She became the hero.

And the politics did shift

at that point.

The Board of Estimate

in an executive session today

voted unanimously

to turn down the proposal

for a

Lower Manhattan Expressway.

The board -- Please.

[applause]

That was the decisive moment.

And Moses

couldn't do anything.

He was just a pure villain.

The politicians were villains.

At that point, it was clear

that no politicians

were gonna get away with this.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was really the beginning

of the end for Robert Moses.

Robert Moses

was finally squeezed out

by Nelson Rockefeller,

who as Governor of New York

might have been

the first public official

powerful enough

to call his bluff.

Moses was famous

for threatening to resign

when he was unhappy

with something.

Rockefeller said

at one point okay

and Moses had no choice.

He couldn't back down

and he was gone.

After the Moses' expressway

situation was finally settled

Jane felt she could go

to Canada with her typewriter

and become a writer again.

Her husband,

who was an architect

was building hospitals

up there.

And their sons were there

be, to keep out of the

that awful Vietnam w*r.

Of course, as soon as

she got to Toronto

she, she saw there was

another expressway

heading right for her house

the Spadina Expressway.

She stopped that too.

And then got to work.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was officially dead

in the year 1970.

Meanwhile, across the country

these kinds of freeway revolts

were taking place

and similar roadways

were being defeated.

But the Lower Manhattan

Expressway

was really

the leading example.

If that had happened,

there would be no SoHo.

The entire history

of development

and redevelopment

and adaptive reuse in the city

would've played out

in a different way.

It would've been

the single most

damaging intervention

in the urban fabric

in Manhattan

in the 20th century, period.

A city is not just

a physical object.

The city is a living thing.

It will always morph

and change.

Our goal has to be to manage

change well

not to freeze it in time.

As cities around the world

are obliged to house

this dramatically

increasing population

we still have

the conversation in terms of

top down versus bottom up

formality versus informality.

These are

the eternal polarities

of thinking about the city.

If you go to China,

you see huge swathes

of farmland that

are now being urbanized

in exactly the model

that America used in 1950s

and we know that it failed.

China today is Moses

on steroids, you know.

And the notion that Moses

could not have conceived

of this extraordinary

scaling up

of what it means to build.

In that sense,

history has outdone him.

These isolated developments

with hundreds

of similar-looking blocks

with no urbanism, no street

who can live in them

and how would you live

in them?

What they are building today,

I think..

...is the slums of the future.

And they're made in concrete.

They're gonna last

at least 60 years.

We are condemning

future generations

to an absolute world

without hope.

Given the scale

of the problem we have

that makes a completely

different context..

...in which Jane Jacobs'

ideas again now

have a new incarnation.

"It is so easy to blame

the decay of cities

"on traffic or immigrants..

"...or the whimsies

of the middle class.

"The decay

of cities goes deeper

and is more complicated.

"It goes right down

to what we think we want

and to our ignorance

about how cities work."

With the amount of people

who now need to live in cities

you have to accept that you're

going to need more density.

But a lot of densely

built up terrain..

...is not a city.

If, when we're to build a city

no matter how fast it is

without building

a great public realm

you don't have a city.

That's what

Jane Jacobs talks about.

Historically,

solutions to city problems

have very seldom come

from the top.

They come from people

who understand

the problems firsthand

'cause they're living

with them

and who have new and ingenious

and often very offbeat ideas

of how to solve them.

The creativity and the concern

and the ideas down there

in city neighborhoods

and city communities

has to be given a chance

has to be released.

People have

to insist on government

trying things their way.

If you gave people

an environment

that they could

shape themselves

they would

not only be happier..

...but you would

have a completely

different kind of city.

The problem for people

who are planning

and designing

and thinking about

all this new urban tissue

that's being created

is how to take some of these

incredibly valuable lessons

that Jane Jacobs teaches

um, and apply them

to the project of creating

the places where,

uh, all of these

billions of people

are going to live.

The key thing

about Jane Jacobs

much more important

than loving stoops

and streets and stuff

was a willingness

to be skeptical

a willingness to doubt

the received wisdom..

...and to trust our eyes

instead.

"Under the seeming disorder

of the old city

"wherever the old city

is working successfully..

"...is a marvelous order

for maintaining the safety

"of the street

"and the freedom of the city.

"It is a complex order.

"This order is all composed

of movement and change.

"And although it is life,

not art..

"...we may fancifully call

it the art form of the city..

"...and liken it to the dance.

"Not to a simpleminded

precision dance

"with everyone kicking up

at the same time

"twirling in unison

and bowing off en masse..

"...but to an intricate ballet

"in which the individual

dancers and ensembles

"all have distinctive parts..

"...which miraculously

reinforce each other..

...and compose

an orderly whole."

[instrumental music]